extinction is forever...

One of the greatest ecosystem on the planet is the air we breathe. It is a very thin veneer of gases that brings life all across the planet. We don't understand it well enough. Yet, we throw our wastes in it because we can. It's cheap, invisible and easy. If we're prepared to do the proper sums, our release of EXTRA carbon dioxide into it, is changing its dynamics. We would be fools not to think so, yet there are too many fools amongst us. The increase of CO2 amongst other rubbish we pump into the atmosphere is increasing the heat retention of this thin layer (about 5 miles thick at most — we could easily walk to the edge of the atmosphere, if it was horizontal, in a couple hours or less). The EXTRA heat modifies the potential of humidity, of drought and wind in the atmosphere apart from creeping temperatures. Some of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans and increase their "acidity". This changes the animal life, especially that of nano-plankton for which observations has quantified skeletal loss in some species as up to 40 per cent... Global warming is far more insidious than we are ready for...

The symbol e is that which I have created to represent Organica Spiritualia. This is to relate our "spiritual being" to nature. In fact it is our human intelligence (reactive animalistic processing of environmental factors for survival into stylistical actions) that creates our "spirtual being". Our consciousness is organic, based on our memory. Most animals that have a central memorising system of environmental factors can have a consciousness of space and position.

Our individual memory is greater than that of individuals in others species and gives us the ability to invent a lot of solutions, including fake solutions that solve "problems" nonetheless... But beyond these fake solutions, including ethical solutions, there are relationship between our generosity and species that do not really matter to our survival.

Organica spiritualia gives us the power to be generous to nature beyond our needs. But our needs are bathed more and more in greed, another Organica Spiritualia activity with less ethical understanding of where we are at at this point in time — an evolved being from a soup of life on a planet to which we could decide we owe nothing to.

The relationships between human survival and that of other species is often not as important as we could think... But this relationship is more important than our needs, because at this point in time we have evolved to be where we are — together on the planet. It's an ethical choice in which our judgement (or carelessness) of life or death over other species may alter the course of our future history or not... It is a stylistic choice. Extinction of species resulting from our activities is our stylist choice. We can and should choose different and care better.

The global warming controversy is a variety of disputes regarding the nature, causes, and consequences of global warming. The disputed issues include the causes of increased global average air temperature, especially since the mid-20th century, whether this warming trend is unprecedented or within normal climatic variations, whether humankind has contributed significantly to it, and whether the increase is wholly or partially an artifact of poor measurements. Additional disputes concern estimates of climate sensitivity, predictions of additional warming, and what the consequences of global warming will be.

The controversy is significantly more pronounced in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view, though a few organisations hold non-committal positions.

Gus: I quote: the controversy is significantly more pronounced in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view, though a few organisations hold non-committal positions.

Gus: obviously, other living creatures on earth (mostly in decline) have not contributed to global warming. But many of them will suffer from it. There are insidious websites that promote the idea that increase of temperature might be "beneficial" — but I say for some humans, possibly (the rich — not those living in Bangladesh) but most other species will suffer greatly. Raising the temperature for example can determine the gender of crocodiles in the nest. Bleaching of coral, now the second such event witnessed in 2010 (this event as big as the last global bleaching event which was 1998)...

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WASHINGTON — Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.

These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.

At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.

“We are finally seeing species going extinct,” said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. “Now we’ve got the evidence. It’s here. It’s real. This is not just biologists’ intuition. It’s what’s happening.”

Top of the agenda when it comes to saving nature - at least, here - is the notion of giving economic value to services the big outdoors does for us, and pricing out unsustainable use - Payment for Ecosytem Services.

Here's the thing. According to the draft agreement [1.74MB PDF] before negotiators here at the CDB, safeguarding nature across the planet will cost between $30bn and $300bn per year.

That's between 10 and 100 times more than is spent on it at the moment.

No-one claims, by the way, that these numbers are accurate down to the last dollar - they're indicative only.

And they indicate two things. Firstly, a massive spend would be needed; and secondly, given that most highly biodiverse areas are in the relatively poor countries of the tropics, that spend would mean another transfer of money from the industrialised to the developing world - at its upper end, a vast one, dwarfing both existing overseas development aid and the projected $100bn per year for climate change.

The key to making it work - at least in the draft agreement here - is to change the economic paradigm.

These are the key clauses - I've somewhat presumptuously taken out the infamous square brackets and tidied things up a bit (something that's much easier for me to do than for negotiators) so as to focus on the general sense:

- by 2020, at the latest, the values of biodiversity are integrated into national accounts, national and local development and poverty reduction strategies and planning processes

- by 2020, at the latest, incentives harmful to biodiversity are eliminated, phased out or reformed in order to minimise or avoid negative impacts and positive incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity are developed and applied.

So if current economics encourages the degradation of nature - change the economics.

Gus: one of the most important aspect of human desires is our ability for altruistic giving. Approaching the diversity of life on earth from an economic point of view is doomed to failure or to selective rescues only. We need to open our mind to the non-value of diversity for ourselves but immense value for the species themselves. This would be our greatest gift to the earth. We can do it...

I challenge any media organisation, including the ABC, to place, till the end of the year, a small advert (10 seconds for TV — 150 x 80 mm for press) at least once a day or in every edition, warming about the loss of bio-diversity on the planet and our responsibility to do something about it. That would go a long way to let the problem be known. At present there are people in some countries who think biodiversity is some kind of detergent or washing powder.We need the main stream media to be far less lethargic on this subject...

Two species of Antarctic penguins have declined sharply over the past 30 years as their chief food source has been devastated by a combination of other predators, over-fishing, and rapidly melting sea ice caused by global warming, according to a new study released on Monday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Based on studies of Adelie and chinstrap penguins and the ecosystems that have sustained them dating back to the 1970s, the report found that dramatic declines in krill, the shrimp-like creatures that depend on sea ice for reproduction, are chiefly responsible for the more than 50 per cent plunge in the flightless birds' populations in the South Shetland Islands.

The Adelie penguins, which favour sea-ice habitat during the winter, have declined at a 2.9 per cent rate a year over the last decade, while chinstrap penguins, which favour open water, have declined by an even greater 4.3 per cent annual rate over the same period, according to the study.

Some scientists had predicted that the decline in sea-ice habitat in the Antarctic caused by warming air and water temperatures would have a more negative impact on the Adelie penguin populations given their greater dependence on sea ice as a habitat.

Under that so-called "sea-ice hypothesis", the chinstrap penguins were expected to increase their population, at least relative to their Adelie cousins.

But the study found that the abundance - or lack - of krill appears to be playing a greater role in reducing the two species' populations.

Krill feed on photoplankton that thrive under sea ice. According to other recent studies, the krill population in the Southern Ocean has declined by as much as 80 per cent since the 1970s.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has thrown out a key section of an Interior Department rule concerning the threat to polar bears posed by global warming.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled Monday that the Bush administration did not complete a required environmental review when it said the bear's designation as threatened in 2008 could not be used as a backdoor way to control greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration a year later, saying that activities outside of the bear's habitat such as emissions from a power plant could not be controlled using the Endangered Species Act.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that filed a lawsuit over the 2008 rule, said the decision puts the fate of the polar bear back in the hands of the Obama administration and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

"The Obama administration has the chance to do right by the polar bear," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the group. "They need to decide whether the polar bear gets all the protections that other endangered species get, or whether they want to re-adopt a flawed Bush administration decision that exempts greenhouse gases" and other pollutants from the Endangered Species Act.

Sullivan's decision directs the Interior Department to respond by Nov. 17 with a timetable for when it will complete the required environmental review. Sullivan left an interim 2008 designation intact while the case continues.

In a related ruling Monday, Sullivan upheld a ban by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban imports of sport-hunted polar bears as trophies. Safari Club International and other U.S. hunting groups had sought permission to allow bear carcasses to be imported from Canada.